Things to do in London this weekend (20-21 June)

Another hotly anticipated FIFA World Cup is here, along with all the thrills, spills, soaring highs and beer-soaked disappointments it brings. This year, 16 stadiums across Canada, Mexico and the United States will host this epic tournament, which plays out until Sunday July 19 2026. Start the weekend off right by watching Scotland play Morocco on Friday June 19 at 11pm and then fill in the rest of the weekend with the scores of other matches being played. Practically every pub and bar in London will be getting in on the action and vying for your attendance during the World Cup’s biggest games. However, we’ve whittled it down to the places that offer the best atmosphere and the best view of the screen, wherever you station yourself.

With its 31st edition taking place this summer, the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown Festival has long since established itself as a key date in London’s cultural calendar. Each year, the Southbank invites one celebrated artist to curate the festival, with such luminaries as David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, David Byrne, Chaka Khan and Little Simz having previously taken on the exciting task. We expect this summer’s edition of Meltdown to elicit one of the most exciteable reactions to date, seeing as it’s being masterminded by former One Direction member and all-round pop superstar Harry Styles, who has curated a line-up traversing pop, soul, rock and electronica. There’s plenty of emerging British talent featured, including London-based singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya, jazz drummer Yusuf Dayes, folk artist Stephen Fretwell and post-punk duo Getdown Services. They appear alongside veteran performers like Dev Hynes (aka Blood Orange), Beverly Glenn-Copeland, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy and African jazz icon Mulatu Astatke. Styles will also be gracing one of the Southbank Centre’s stages himself for an intimate headline gig. 

Steven Spielberg returns to sci-fi. The fabulous Emily Blunt is Detroit TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, whose life takes a freaky turn after a strange kitchen table encounter with a cardinal bird. Within moments, she’s speaking fluent Russian to her boyfriend (Thunderbolts*’ Wyatt Russell) and doing an alien-sounding clicking sound on live TV. ​Turns out ET isn’t phoning home any more, ​h​e’s presenting the weather. Also​ on the run is cybersecurity wonk-turned-whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) with stolen files from ​a sinister agency that prove the existence of aliens. It’s a lot to pack in. Boiled down, though, it’s the connection between Margaret and Daniel that underpins the fugitive thriller that breaks out. 

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time. The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour. If you are a gaga for geometry, are fascinated by fractals, or just have a penchant for the psychedelic, you will find plenty to be engrossed by here. 

Hiding in plain sight, you’ll find the demure Camille on the very edge of Borough Market. It’s a small, pretty place. There are a handful of tables outside, and a chic burgundy and primrose colour scheme within. It doesn’t shout about its elegance, but rather whispers it seductively into your ear. Opened a couple of years back by the same team behind Soho’s Ducksoup, this French bistro immediately blew its forebear out of the water thanks to the skill and tenacity of head chef Elliot Hashtroudi. He’s not French himself, but is committed to the full-throttle nature of the country’s rustic, earthy cuisine. A case in point; offal. You’ll find cocks comb schnitzel and snout cassoulet on the menu, and both are sublime. For the less adventurous, there is still a world of wonder here. The tartare is one of the best we’ve had, and rosy slices of onglet are topped with Pevensey blue cheese. It’s a triumph of imagination, talent, and guts.

Munch your way through dishes from the great and the good of the capital’s restaurant scene at this sprawling culinary festival in the picturesque surroundings of central London’s Regent’s Park. New Syrian brunch joint Aram, hyped Dalston gastropub The Prince Arthur and masters of Pan-Pacific cuisine Los Mochis are among the restaurants peddling plates and appearing at the event for the first time this year. If you’re not in a food coma by the end, there’ll also be kitchen masterclasses, chef talks and tastings to get involved with. Our advice? Have some Rennies on hand. 

The Barbican is shining a spotlight on Pan-Africanism in contemporary art, cinema, music and performance in this summer-long creative series, which will feature more than 30 events as well as an art exhibition. Coined in the early 1900s, the umbrella term Pan-Africanism encompasses political and philosophical movements advocating for self-determination, anti-colonial resistance and transnational solidarity among peoples of African descent. Highlights include the central exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica with 300 works, including paintings, installations, posters, journals and film. Look out for Carnival dance workshops, Carnival costume-making workshops, late-night parties and live music performances, too. 

A forlorn widower campaigns to save the heritage of his small Scottish town from Hollywood-isation in this offbeat comedy-drama from first-time filmmaker Seán Dunn. A kind of tartan Taxi Driver, it combines Bill Forsyth’s whimsical Celtic charm with a slug of Ben Wheatley’s bitumen-black humour. It nails its ambitious, unusual tone nicely and Peter Mullan is a delight as the lowlands’ lonely man. Mullan makes it worth the watch, and there’s also an excellent score by Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, which adds eerie madrigals and haunting electronica to this combustible mix. Seen Local Hero? Give ‘Local Antihero’ a spin.

The National Theatre has brought back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. It’s still incredible. Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Number two: sure, it’s a reasonably trope-filled story about the First World War, adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 book with a plot that revolves around the doomed British cavalry who discovered they were obsolete in the worst way possible during the early weeks of the conflict. It’s sturdy, unfussy storytelling, but this gives it a purity and timelessness.  The years haven’t touched War Horse, and short of a radical rethink of our attitude to WW1 or, puppets, it’s hard to imagine why it would ever age. 

With over 120 stalls, a traditional Victorian fairground, a beer tent, a dog show, tug of war, a charity raffle and live local bands, Kew’s midsummer fete is a lot more than simply a way to chill out on the village green this month. Entry is free, but all your well-spent cash will be going to some worthy local charities. 

This literary festival focuses on one of our era’s most exciting genres: crime. Now firmly part of London’s literary calendar, each year it hosts a top-notch line-up of crime and thriller authors in a rich programme of talks, panels and interviews. Over 100 authors and experts will feature over the three-day programme of panels, Q&As, book launches and industry networking events, culminating in the Fingerprint Awards, an annual reader-voted awards ceremony celebrating the very best new writing in the genre. Details of the 2026 line-up are yet to be announced, but we’ll be conducting a thorough investigation in due course.

Take a look beyond the surface of London with the London Festival of Architecture, and you'll discover the planners, designers, and ideas that have shaped our streets. This year's theme is 'Belonging', which means there's a focus on community, and how we care for the spaces we live in. There are over 400 events on the line-up, including guided walks, exhibitions, talks, installations and performances. For the first time, The London Centre in Guildhall will act as the festival's central hub, hosting talks and performances, a Lego challenge (Sat June 20), and a TfL bus display exhibition. 

Alexandra Palace will erupt in mayhem in June as dozens of DIY taboggans dart down the hill for the downright absurd Red Bull Soapbox Race. The annual race challenges adrenaline junkies to create the whackiest vehicle they can, then ride it down the track powered only by gravity. Along the way, they’ll encounter obstacles like The Water Roller, The Wedge, The Bone Rattler and The Kicker – it’s very rare that cars make it to the bottom of the course unscathed. Either watch safely from the sidelines. 

Faithfully capturing the simple joys and craziness of the beloved 1980s TV cartoon, the Masters of the Universe story starts in Eternia, a beautiful, fairytale fantasy. Here, sensitive little Prince Adam is told to ‘be a man’ by his father who forces him into combat training. When the family are attacked by the evil Skeletor, Adam is sent to Earth via an intergalactic rainbow highway (very Thor). Adam gets a Clark Kent-type job in HR before retrieving his magical sword and going back to fight for Eternia. After decades in development hell, Masters of the Universe finally fell into the right hands with Bumblebee director Travis Knight. Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, his is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal. It features many of its fan-favourite, straight-out-the-toybox battle characters and best of all is the epic rock/synth score by British composer Daniel Pemberton. 

This intense debut play from Georgie Dettmer is a vignette-based style of drama, and it’s not apparent for the first third or so that it’s a play that will actually cohere. Its cluster of storylines about the intersection of web-age voyeurism, female sexuality and male violence are compelling but there’s a nagging worry that it’s going to be tricky to pay all this stuff off at the end. But, it does and, moreover, it has an implacable momentum twinned with immaculately icy production from director Jess Edwards. Amidst a barrage of scenes that run the gamut from a Hollywood star aghast at deepfakes to a frustrated mother being schooled by the police on what sort of information she should put out about her missing daughter, there’s a central plot of sorts. It concerns the horrifying case of Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose husband drugged her and, over several years, invited dozens of men to rape her while asleep, something he filmed and photographed – which is what eventually led to his discovery. It’s a terrific debut play, wonderfully directed, and with a great, hard-working cast. As disturbing an hour of theatre as you’ll see on the London stage.

High Society is, of course, a pure joy, the stage incarnation of a ludicrously frothy Golden Age Cole Porter musical that has a plot you could blow over with a feather, plus some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’, ‘Well Did You Evah’, ‘Let’s Misbehave’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – the banger level is off the chart. With songs as good as these and a cast just as good to match them, you’re in for a very nice evening at the theatre. 

Aussie singer-songwriter Eddie Perfect’s all-singing take on the 1988 Tim Burton classic is very definitely a retelling, taking most of the core elements of the supernatural comedy and positioning them together in a very different, very ’20s musical theatre way. Alex Timbers’ production was a big Broadway hit. Here, David Fynn’s Betelgeuse is a mischievous spirit with foreknowledge of the imminent deaths of Barbara and Adam Maitland, whose house he’s been haunting (or at least lurking in) for some years. He’s the lead character from the off, greeting us with an onslaught of meta-wisecracks and iffy pop cultural references as he outlines the beginnings of his very convoluted scheme to gain a foothold in the human world via Lydia Deetz, the daughter of the family that buys the house after the Maitlands croak it. It has nice sets, nice ballads and if you like aggressively knowing 21st century Broadway humour, you’ll have fun.

One of Peter Shaffer’s most fondly remembered works is 1965’s Black Comedy, a throwaway one-act drawing room farce designed with astoundingly virtuosic precision, like a gaudy Christmas cracker that turns out to have a Fabergé egg inside. In it, skint artist Brindsley Miller tries to play off his ex, his fiancé, his neighbours, his fiancé’s dad and a guy from the electricity board as he frantically attempts to get his flat ready to impress a visiting German millionaire in the middle of a power cut. Shaffer’s audacious innovation is to reverse the lighting cues, so that when the lights in Brindsley’s flat are on, we’re plunged into total darkness, and when the lights are off, the theatre is brightly lit but the characters in the play can’t see anything. If it was significantly longer, it might run out of steam. But at one 90-minute act it’s damn near immaculate.

Works by Yung Lean, 070 Shake, Foals’ Yannis Philippakis and Charlize Theron will all be featured in this audiovisual exhibition at 180 Studios, created by film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (also know as Gener8ion). Visions of 2034 will display seven new and previously unseen short films, alongside an immersive installation and unseen Gener8ion footage and visuals. The immersive space will take visitors to a fictional world of 2034, where ‘hundreds of skittish and charasmatic’ characters will be waiting to greet them as they explore the works celebrating music, art, cinema and choreography. 

Charli xcx is having a moment on the big screen. With a lick of the French New Wave, a nip of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and a dash of the playful end of the Polish Film School, Erupcja is her latest cinematic project. Writer, director, editor and cinematographer Pete Ohs’ shot-on-the-hop, playfully wistful deconstruction of the romcom, co-written with his cast, presents Charli as restless soul, Bethany. A return visitor to Poland’s capital city, Warsaw, this time she’s brought her live-in boyfriend, Rob, played by fellow musician-turned-actor Will Madden. Her glazed looks, as they endure the frustrating mundanity of self-checking-in to an Airbnb, suggest she’s already checked out of their relationship. Charli xcx was made for this kind of slacker comedy served with a side of ennui, and she shares undeniable chemistry with Góra.

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the pioneering Argentinian artist has been making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works for seven decades, and is still making art at the ripe old age of 97. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.

As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways. Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.

Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls. The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. 

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £23.60!

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Broadwick Soho arrived with serious flair in 2023 and has been serving up a hit of West End glamour, that feels both indulgent and effortlessly cool ever since. Tucked inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths that could tell a few stories. The menu leans into refined Italian comfort with superior pasta and reimagined classics, making it an ideal spot to settle in for dinner.

With this exclusive Time Out offer, you can sink into Soho’s newest slice of dolce vita decadence for less with a three courses set meun and a glass of Champagne (worth £22). The perfect pre-theatre treat or the start of a night that might run on far longer than planned.

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The National Portrait Gallery’s summer 2026 exhibition is turning the spotlight on one of the twentieth century’s biggest icons. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait will be a real blockbuster, exploring the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most alluring figures through works by some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and photographers, including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, Marlene Dumas, Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. 

After pulling in millions of visitors in Amsterdam and Barcelona, Moco Museum London has landed beside Marble Arch with a three-floor showcase of modern, contemporary and immersive art. Inside, you’ll find more than 100 works from names including Banksy, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Yayoi Kusama, alongside immersive digital rooms and sensory installations designed to pull you into the artwork. There’s also the limited-run exhibition ‘Voice of the Street’, dedicated to Haring’s legendary New York subway drawings from the early 1980s. Flex-entry tickets start from £15, so you can drop in whenever suits during opening hours.

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The first major European exhibition of James McNeil Whistler’s work in 30 years arrives at Tate Britain in 2026. Known as a truly global artist, The Victorian oil painter re-wrote many of the rules of art, and was an early adopter of ’art for art’s sake’. The retrospective brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Mr Bean fans will recognise this one, IYKYK) alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits.